Facebook as an Alternative E-Mail Platform

This makes some sense when one considers that providers of CRM
applications, such as Oracle, Salesforce.com and RightNow, integrate with
Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools to enable employees to
improve sales, marketing and customer service activities. Nucleus is working on
a similar office productivity study for Twitter.
Facebook is also subsuming traditional Outlook applications as the e-mail
delivery application of choice for some users in some cases, Nucleus found. The
problem with this, of course, is that Facebook isn't governed by corporate
regulations and etiquette rules. Individual users decide what content gets
shared via e-mail, and IT administrators cannot see what employees are sharing.
Nucleus noted:

Savvy younger users recognize that
traditional e-mail and even personal accounts like Gmail can be monitored by
corporate IT, while Facebook messages aren't. For organizations that have
invested in security software to secure sensitive information and limit their
transmission via e-mail, Facebook can help users circumvent those controls,
opening up the potential to violate corporate communication policies.

This can get out of control. Nucleus found one doctor friending his patients
and a hospital where nurses shared patient information with other nurses, which
exposed them and their employers to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act) violations.
Ultimately, Nucleus cautioned that while some users in these business
environments might see their productivity increased by Facebook and other
social networks, companies should weigh the business benefit of lead generation
or responding to comments on social networking sites about their operations or
products against the potential productivity loss of all employees with access
to those sites.
However, it is also important to note that 237 subjects is a small sample of
the now over 250 million users of Facebook. ReadWriteWeb didn't like
Nucleus' findings and countered them with results from the University
of Melbourne, where researcher
Brent Coker surveyed 300 workers.

Coker found
that people who took small breaks between tasks were 9 percent more
productive than their colleagues who did not. "It gives them a chance to reset
their concentration," Coker said.
That means companies that block access to social networking sites like
MySpace and Facebook could actually be inadvertently decreasing employee
productivity.